Beatriz Guzman Catena was born in Argentina, she lives and works in the area of Paris, France. She studied Architecture at the University of Buenos Aires, where she
graduated in 2001. In 1999, she received a Fellowship from the “Fondo Nacional
de las Artes”. She currently shows her work in France and Belgium.

Memory, Fictions and Playing for Time

Everything that is contained in a given space, things and the links among them, provide starting points for painted scenes I create as an exploration of the construction of reality.

Narrative sequences are thus born or reconstructed, connected to each other by spontaneous links.

Every picture is a collage that I piece together to rebuild an everyday scene of my life. What has survived in memory is ranked, categorized. Maps, blueprints, any cartography or visual reference from de real world are the basis for my preliminary notes and sketches.

However, I deliberately introduce a sense of doubt about the events, simply by replacing a character with an allusion, a historical element that takes his or her place.

It is about playing with a set of different stories, whimsically choosing when and why to stall. It could about the beauty of a metaphor or a need for reparation. Letting images in, images whispered by the unknown, guided by desire or logical necessity. Charting a symbolic road between what I know and what I feel, or just the other way around, between the sensation of an image and what is really seen.

I work on the notion of instability, I visit the past and represent its uncertainty through new readings and interpretations. Such tales become a ceaseless retranscription.